Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Serengeti Book Tour and Giveaway for a $10 Amazon Gift Card and Fan Art Postcards

Serengeti

by J.B. Rockwell

Genre: SciFi Adventure

It was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti—a Valkyrieclass warship with a sentient AI brain—on her own; wrecked and abandoned in an empty expanse of space.

On the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the cryogenically frozen crew inside.

Then a scavenger ship arrives to pick Serengeti's bones clean.

Her engines dead, her guns long silenced, Serengeti and her last two robots must find a way to fight the scavengers off and save the crew trapped inside her.

“Repairs complete,” Serengeti said, making a last few adjustments before bringing the probe’s feed online.

“I had it,” Finlay muttered, stabbing angrily at the console in front of her.

“Stow it, Finlay,” Henricksen barked.

Finlay flushed brightly. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” She raised her eyes to the camera in front of her, looking angry and contrite at the same time. She nodded stiffly to the camera and then bowed her head, focusing all of her attention on the Scan station in front of her.

Finlay was a hard charger and didn’t like being shown up. By anyone. Not even a Valkyrie class starship. Serengeti filed that away, adding it to the library of information she’d collected from her human crews over the years. She was AI, her mind a thousand times more powerful than a human’s organic brain, but she forgot sometimes how important it was for humans to feel needed.

Need. Such a strange concept. So difficult for an AI to understand. Truth be told, Serengeti didn’t really need her human crew. It was slower -- infinitely slower -- to let them run basic ship’s operations. She could manage everything on her own and still have enough processing power to monitor the hundreds of cameras and relays, circuits and networks and every other thing wired into her body.

But I like having them about, Serengeti thought to herself.

Crew was…comforting. For herself and the humans who’d made her. Truth be told, humans still didn’t quite trust AIs. Funny, considering human engineers designed every last one of them, making them stronger, more capable with each generation. Humans built AIs and wrapped them inside armored shells they launched into the stars, but they still wanted human crews on board those space-faring ships. Human minds and human judgment as a counter -- or perhaps a foil -- to ship’s intelligence. Because most AIs couldn’t feel in the way humans did.

Maybe there’s something to that, Serengeti mused. We’ve learned emotion -- some of us anyway -- but it’s not organic. Not innate.

She cast her eyes across the bridge, looking from Henricksen to the stations behind him, circling around to Finlay at Scan. Need was important—Serengeti learned that over the years. Next time, she’d let Finlay run the scans and argue with Number Ten.

Good luck with that one, sister.

Serengeti 2:

Dark and Stars

Fifty-three years Serengeti drifted, dreaming in the depths of space. Fifty-three years of patient waiting before her Valkyrie Sisters arrive to retrieve her from the dark. A bittersweet homecoming follows, the Fleet Serengeti once knew now in shambles, its admiral, Cerberus, gone missing, leaving Brutus in charge. Brutus who’s subsumed the Fleet, ignoring his duty to the Meridian Alliance to pursue a vendetta against the Dark Star Revolution.

The Valkyries have a plan to stop him—depose Brutus and restore the Fleet’s purpose—and that plan involves Serengeti. Depends on Serengeti turning her guns against her own.

Because the Fleet can no longer be trusted. With Brutus in charge, it’s just Serengeti and her Sisters, and whatever reinforcements they can find.

A top-to-bottom refit restores Serengeti to service, and after a rushed reunion with Henricksen and her surviving crew, she takes off for the stars. For Faraday—a prison station—to stage a jailbreak, and free the hundreds of Meridian Alliance AIs wrongfully imprisoned in its Vault. From there to the Pandoran Cloud and a rendezvous with her Valkyrie Sisters. To retrieve a fleet of rebel ships stashed away inside.

One last battle, one last showdown with Brutus and his Dreadnoughts and it all ends. A civil war—one half of the Meridian Alliance Fleet turned against the other, with the very future of the Meridian Alliance hanging in the balance.

Black Ops—the intelligence arm of the Meridian Alliance Fleet came calling with an offer Henricksen couldn’t refuse: a ship—an entire squadron of ships, actually—and crew to command. A chance to get back to the stars.

Too bad he didn’t ask more questions before accepting the assignment. Too bad no one told him just how dangerous this particular skunkworks project was.

They call the ship the RV-N: Reconnaissance Vessel - Non-combat, Raven for short. A stealth ship—fast, and maneuverable, and brutal as hell. On the surface, Henricksen's assignment seems simple: train his crew, run the RV-Ns through their paces, get the ships certified for mission operations and job done. But an accident in training reveals a fatal design flaw in the Raven, and when an undercover operative steals classified information from a Black Ops facility, the Fleet Brass cancels the tests completely, rushing the faulty ships and their half-trained crew into live operations. On a mission to recover the Fleet’s lost secrets.

Out of time and out of options, Henricksen has no choice but to launch his squadron. But a ghost from his past makes him question everything—the ships, their AI, the entirety of this mission, right down to the secrets he and his crew are supposed to recover.

J.B. Rockwell is a New Englander, which is important to note because it means she's (a) hard-headed, (b) frequently stubborn, and (c) prone to fits of snarky sarcasticness. As a kid she subsisted on a steady diet of fairy tales, folklore, mythology augmented by generous helpings of science fiction and fantasy. As a quasi-adult, she dreamed of being the next Indiana Jones and even pursued (and earned!) a degree in anthropology. Unfortunately, those dreams of being an archaeologist didn't quite work out. Through a series of twists and turns (involving cats, a marriage, and a SCUBA certification, amongst other things) she ended up working in IT for the U.S. Coast Guard and now writes the types of books she used to read. Not a bad ending for an Indiana Jones wannabe...

About Me

Susan M. Heim is a writer and editor,
specializing in parenting, multiples, Christian and women’s issues. Her books
include It’s Twins! Parent-to-Parent Advice from Infancy Through
Adolescence; Boosting Your Baby’s Brain Power; Oh, Baby! 7 Ways a Baby Will
Change Your Life the First Year;Twice the Love: Stories of
Inspiration for Families with Twins, Multiples and Singletons; and numerous Chicken Soup
for the Soul books. Her
articles have appeared in many books, magazines and websites. Visit her author site at www.susanheim.com.